Re: ideas for Google Summer of Code

[Johannes Schindelin]

Hi,

On Fri, 16 Jan 2009, Reinhold Kainhofer wrote:

> On Friday 16 January 2009 02:46:22 Johannes Schindelin wrote:
> > - the mentor is also expected to work almost full time at least in the
> >   beginning,
> 
> Sorry, but from my experience with mentoring KDE projects, this is not 
> really true. It mostly depends on the student, of course, but the main 
> point is that the student can easily contact the mentor (some short IRC 
> sessions have proved to be extremely productive). The mentor doesn't 
> have to be available full time or even work on the project full time. He 
> rather needs to have a thorough knowledge of how to proceed and provide 
> the correct pointers. The rest is usually figured out by the student 
> anyway. At least these are my experiences.

And in my experience, the more complicated the source code is, the more 
hand-holding will be required.

For example, Git's source code is not all that hard to read, yet I had to 
invest a substantial amount of time during the first month to get my 
students going.

Done right, the second half of the project is relaxing for the mentor.

Don't get me wrong: I'd love to see a GSoC project working on LilyPond, I 
just don't see it happen for three reasons:

- it is relatively hard to come up with a project that is neither too 
  small nor too big for 3 months, from what I see in LilyPond,

- the natural mentor for any LilyPond project says he's not available, and

- Google announced that they want to _shrink_ the SoC this year, which 
  means LilyPond would compete with projects that already were in previous 
  GSoCs and actually wanted _more_ slots instead of _less_ slots.  That is 
  pure politics, unfortunately.

Ciao,
Dscho